32 Banking Analytics FIs Need To Truly Understand Client Engagement

By Jillian Wood - Mar 30, 2023

Let’s talk about data. (We promise it will be interesting and practical!)

Many banks and credit unions overlook the treasure trove of customer, product, and staffing data contained in their high-value appointments. (By this we mean engagements to procure mortgages, loans, wealth management, etc.)

Most banks and credit unions don’t understand where appointments come from. Or why. Or which are trending up or down. Or how many walkins turn into appointments vs. transactions. Or which staff have the most appointments or, or or…

By not knowing this information, institutions are missing out on ways to improve their customer or member experience, strengthen engagement, and accelerate growth for their top products and services.

In this article, we’ll share the 32 important banking analytics financial institutions should consider tracking around the appointment experience (from booking to follow-ups). We’ll also reveal where to source the data and show how they can help improve your performance.

Top CX Metrics for Banks and Credit Unions

One of the first challenges of banking analytics is choice paralysis: having so many metrics that you could track that you track none at all.

Instead of presenting you with every possible option, we’ve filtered out the vanity metrics and broken down 32 CX metrics that will provide invaluable insight into your bank or credit union.

To make it easier to explore these metrics, we’ve split them into three categories: client, product, and staff metrics. 

Client Metrics: Get to Know Your Customers and Members 

The first data category focuses on how your customers or members interact with your bank or credit union. This is to track things like product usage, engagement, satisfaction, and activity. These help you understand client preferences and behaviors—and figure out how to encourage the habits or actions you’d prefer.

• Total interactions online: Track how many interactions your customers or members have with your bank or credit union. Use this metric for a high-level analysis of seasonal trends and growth trajectories.
• Total interactions with staff: Count how many interactions customers or members have with your employees—whether that’s via phone, video chat, email, or in-person. Measuring staff interactions allows you to track customer preferences and (if necessary) rebalance your staff scheduling.
• Missed appointments: the total number of appointments that get missed. This can be per branch or per advisor, on a monthly timeline.
• Show-up rate: This is simply the percentage of people who show up for booked appointments. Higher is always better.
• No-show rate: Conversely, your no-show rate measures how many people don’t show up for appointments. A consistently high no-show rate suggests something is wrong with your service or communication.
• Customer satisfaction: Measure the overall satisfaction of your customer or members with a metric like CSAT or NPS. You can slice the data to show individual client satisfaction, average branch satisfaction, and satisfaction within particular demographics.
• Most engaged: Find the members or customers who are most engaged with your services. If you’re running referral campaigns or customer research, start with your power users.
• Summary by client or household: Report all interactions from a single client or household. This gives you a snapshot of their history, which can shortcut a lot of manual fact-finding during calls or account reviews.
• Client activity overview: See all a client’s interactions with your staff, digital campaigns, and service history. Identify trends in their needs, including relevant products and services that they’re not using.
• Top acquisition channels: Report on your most effective sales and marketing channels. Invest in your top acquisition channels and cut underperforming alternatives.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): This metric measures the total revenue you expect to make from your average member or customer during their lifetime. It’s useful for gauging the long-term success of sales and marketing efforts.

Product Metrics: Learn How People Are Using Your Products 

Our second data category switches focus to your products and services. Delving into product usage, resourcing requirements, and acquisition channels reveals a lot about your organization, including where you can make improvements.

• Total products: Track the total number of products your customers or members have with your bank or credit union. Like most high-level metrics, the total products metric provides directional trends (for example, you’re growing or contracting), but you’ll need extra data for context and nuance.
• Most popular services: Measure the popularity of specific products and services. Often, there’s a Pareto principle at play where a small number of products drive the majority of your revenue.
• Average products per transaction: Track how many products your members or customers touch during a single transaction. This metric is essential if you’re pursuing a cross-selling strategy.
• Average products per interaction: A very similar metric, but measuring average products over interactions (individual appointments or meetings) rather than transactions. Again, it’s helpful to understand your cross-selling performance.
• Average interactions per product/service type: Investigate your customer or member journey by counting how many interactions it takes to close a service, per product type. Note: A high score isn’t necessarily good or bad. High average interactions could be caused by curious repeat customers—or confused, unconvinced members.
• Top channels: This metric drills down into product-specific acquisition channels and usage. How did people find you? How did they book their appointments? (Through your website? Your staff?)

Staff Metrics: Make The Most Of Your Most Valuable Asset: Your People 

Our final data category looks at your employees or associates. These metrics measure utilization, efficiency, excess capacity, and more so you can get visibility into the role staff play in the client experience.

• Total interactions with clients: This measures your bank’s or credit union’s total number of client interactions. It adds nuance to utilization rates and engagement levels because you’ll know how complex recent engagements have been.
• Appointments per location: Track total appointments by branch for a more granular demand report. Once you know how locations differ, you can design tailored staff schedules, marketing campaigns, and so on.
• Appointments per staff: This gives you the number of appointments made with each staff member. Identify low utilization rates and work out how to make better use of those staff members.
• Lead time for booking: This is how long it takes from the time someone books an appointment to when they actually have the engagement. Typically, excessive delays can suggest problems with your scheduling or booking processes, but some folks may like to book well in advance.
• Walk-in volume: Measure how many people walk into your branches. Identify overall traffic patterns, highlight times when you’re over or under-staffed, and balance your staffing schedules.
• Wait times: When someone contacts your bank or credit union, how long does it take them to be seen? Long wait times are universally bad. Modern consumers expect prompt service and will vote with their feet if you’re slow.
• Handle time: When a customer or member begins interacting with one of your employees, the clock starts ticking. Handle time measures how long it takes to complete an interaction (and ideally delight your customer or member).
• Abandonment time: This metric tracks, on average, how long customers and members wait on hold before hanging up. Aim to keep your average wait times comfortably under your abandonment times to avoid frustrating people.
• Busiest and slowest branch times: Demand is rarely uniform through the days, weeks, and months. Track branch activity to identify your busy and quiet periods.
• Waitlist trends: Individual data points only tell you so much. Measuring your waitlist trends—whether they’re growing or shrinking—lets you know if you’re moving in the right direction.
• Staff interactions: Measure the number of interactions people have with individual staff members. This will help you gauge utilization and engagement.
• Staff utilization: Track how much time your employees spend on appointments and appointment-related tasks, like attending meetings and processing paperwork.
• Staff capacity: How much time staff has open for future appointments. Make sure you’re not investing in sales and marketing efforts unless you have the capacity to support new customers or members.
• Location deep dive: Take a closer look at specific branches, analyzing customer traffic, sales, and other key indicators. Benchmark performance and identify opportunities for improvement at each branch.
• Location traffic trends: Consumer behavior is always changing. Track changes in customer and member traffic, highlight patterns, and update your staffing schedules, marketing campaigns, and other initiatives accordingly.

Where Can I Find Banking Analytics Data?

When a lot of people hear data, their minds go to complex custom monitoring software, data lakes, and warehousing. But like a fine white wine, simple done well often trumps complex done poorly.

In fact, you probably already have all the tools and systems in place to record and save the metrics we’ve discussed.

Here are the seven sources for your core metrics:

1. Appointment and queuing platform: Shows desired services, handle time, wait and lead times, no-show rate, source, completion, and outcomes.
2. Survey results: Shows satisfaction, sentiment, needs, and requests.
3. Customer relationship management (CRM) tool: Shows staff activities, opportunities, interactions, and products.
4. Marketing tools: Shows interactions, product interest, and campaign performance.
5. Contact center tools: Shows service issues and resolutions.
6. Website, online banking, and mobile apps: Shows interactions and desired services, as well as appointment acquisition channels.
7. Associates and staff feedback channels: Shows staff sentiment and qualitative feedback around the appointment process.

As your analytics function matures, you may want to add new technology and tools. But as a foundation, these seven will power the lion’s share of your data collection.

How Do I Set Up A Banking Analytics Function?

There’s a saying in analytics: Too much data, too few actionable insights. This means that modern companies overload on data volume, burying their strategy with data without a way to make sense of it. 

That doesn’t sit well with us. So, in this section, we’ll teach you how to build an analytics function that makes sense of your metrics.

Phase 1: Build Your Data Collection Foundation

Begin by identifying what tools, services, and systems you already have—things like your appointment scheduling system, contact center platform, and mobile app backend. Extract data from your systems and tag it with metadata for improved organization. Finally, organize everything in a simple data catalog. Again, this doesn’t have to be complex. A basic spreadsheet will work.

Phase 2: Set Up Banking Analytics to Measure Continuously

Once you have your data collection and organization running smoothly, you need a way to display it. That’s where an analytics dashboard comes in. Build or buy an analytics dashboard. Set customer or member experience goals and run experiments to improve your performance towards the target.

Phase 3: Start Making Forecasts

Data can do more than evaluate past performance. It can predict the future, too. Focus on areas where you have robust past data. Use historical data to predict future conditions, remembering to include conditions or outside factors that may influence your data. (Read our guide to forecasting to get step-by-step instructions.)

Unlock New Growth With Banking Analytics

Analytics must have a purpose. For banks and credit unions, that purpose is to improve your customer or member experience, develop client engagement, and accelerate your growth.

To take your banking analytics to the next level, we’ve put together a full Banking Analytics Guide. It includes deep dives into not just metrics, but also data collection, analysis, and forecasting.